Thursday, May 31, 2007

Microsoft's Suing Threat

If Microsoft is facing unfavorable market trends, guess what they need do is to put on their creative hat and innovate instead of litigate as they are planning to do with their threat to "take on" free software based on uncertified allegations of patent infringement.

We know vista isn’t doing superb. We know that the desktop isn’t the gold spot it used to be; the internet is and the value resides there now. And we know that Microsoft is fighting tooth and nail plus everything else to get a share of this sumptuous market (Microsoft’s biggest acquisition ever: aQuantive, attest to this).

But putting up a fight and acting threatening is not the way to go, in fact it is a bad idea.

Microsoft needs to understand that the monopolistic era is over and acting like a bully who single-handedly snuffed Netscape out of the market won't be of much help in recent times. The landscape has changed.

Cue should be taken from a company like sun. A company that was faced with unfavorable market trends some couple of years back with the core solaris operating system. Instead of putting up a fight, threatening, fuming and bluffing (like the Redmond behemoth seems to be doing); they reevaluated their business model and reconsidered their source of value. They recreated part of their business model. In other words, they were creative.

They are now better for it today. The community behind openSolaris is growing, ODF is gaining greater adoption and Java is finding its way into almost everywhere (learnt javaONE is today’s world's largest open source developer conference).

Microsoft might just find itself dying off with this entire attitude that is pro-monopolistic and ‘anti open source’ in nature because in today’s world, the community (which open source initiative enjoys) is a major propagator of value.